I just installed the 32-bit Mandriva 2008.0 Powerpack on my mom's laptop, and it is extremely unstable. At first it kept crashing after the Nvidia splash, right before KDM appears. I tried switching to the nv and vesa drivers, all of which exhibited the same behaviour. I tried disabling the composite extension and the glx module, which had no effect. I tried the usual noapic nolapic acpi=off ide=nodma dance to no avail. I also tried elevator=as without luck. I tried the desktop kernel and the i586 legacy kernel without luck. After installing those kernels, the laptop keeps crashing at random points in the boot process, and never makes it to the point where it starts X. It occurred to me that random crashing during the boot process might be the result of overheating, but Vista and an Ubuntu LiveCD work without any problems (well, Vista boots, but I wouldn't call it problem-free per se). 9 out of 10 times booting in safe mode works. Previously, she ran 2007.0 and 2007.1 without any problems on the same computer. Any suggestions before I tell her that she has to use 2007.1 forever or switch to a different distro?

which ACer?

I have a 5035wli that t works great on, even got the wireless working

you should be able to check the temperature with:

acpi -V

(most laptops now give temperature readings via ACPI)

compare the numbers between MDV and Ubuntu to see if they're significantly different.

You could try kernel-tmb from contrib, on the offchance that'll work better.

It's an Aspire 9300. 2008 also works fine on my Aspire 5300. Very odd. There are no significant temperature differences.

The KDM log is incomplete, so I know that X is crashing before input devices are fully initialized, and I doubt the greeter is ever called. Thanks for the suggestions, but I think it's time to give up.